Updated: IRS e-mails not lost after all—just buried in offsite backups, group claims

Former IRS official Lois Lerner giving testimony to a Congressional committee in 2013. The IRS says it can't find her e-mails from before 2011—but Justice Watch says they're in disaster recovery backups.

Unnamed Department of Justice attorneys admitted to an attorney from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch that backups exist of the e-mail messages of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. In a press release on the organization’s website, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the DOJ official claimed that accessing the specific e-mails in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS would be too difficult, as they were retained in an offsite backup for disaster recovery.

Update: An unnamed White House official told The Hill that no new backups had been discovered. "The administration official said that the inspector general is examining whether any data can be recovered from the previously recycled back-up tapes and suggested that could be the cause of the confusion between the government and Judicial Watch," The Hill's Bernie Becker reported.

“Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s e-mails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe,” Fitton said in the statement. “The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system. We obviously disagree that disclosing the emails as required would be onerous, and plan to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan.”

Disaster recovery backups of IRS systems are conducted in accordance with the agency’s Information System Contingency Plan. Those regulations require offsite storage of backup media to allow the continuity of operations of the IRS in the event of a major disaster, just as is required by all federal agencies. But it’s not clear what format those backups were in, or with what frequency they were retained. And there have been failures in backup testing in the past.

In a 2012 report, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration noted that a July 2011 disaster recovery test failed because backup tapes had not been made for a mainframe’s databases. “Five application databases were not recoverable, “ the IG team found. IRS was in the process of moving to use of "virtual tape"—backups to hard disk instead of tape drives that could be replicated off-site—in 2012, at least for critical systems. But e-mail system backups were still being done on tape.

There was no mention of any testing of e-mail backups in the IG report. And there’s no explicit mention of e-mail systems in IRS’s disaster recovery plan—other than the “IT IT DR Mailbox,” the mail address for disaster recovery requests.

Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat